I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

I can do whatever I want.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

I wanted to write.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

The world’s biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America – land of the free, home of the brave.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I have some good friends of my own who happen to be gay, and when it comes to gay, straight, or whatever, I’m for anything life-affirmative. I’m for gay power, straight power, male power, female power; everybody should feel empowered without oppressing anyone who’s different.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

Clothing & fashion are kind of my security blanket, almost.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.